Your ignorance and anecdote do not equate to facts.
The facts are that publishers, who often own developers, have basically been reporting record profits for the last several years. This has coincided with announcing that and immediately firing huge amounts of the actual programmers and people working on games. Basically terminating the people who made the management so much money, because they are treated as a commodity rather than a sustainable resource.
For examples see:
Blizzard
MS
Activision (yes, listing separately because they are the same company but act partially differently)
Ubisoft....yes, record profits and record expenses do demonstrably lead to failure
You should be able to search more...but it's a 20 second google search. Likewise, developers like RockStar sell a full priced game, then spend pennies installing gatcha mechanics that belong in free to play. It's basically printing nearly free money.
The bad decision, because you apparently cannot read, is that pricing everything at $100 is not sustainable.
You seem to be a bit thick, so let me explain this real simple. RockStar adding the free to play market to their full priced game is a bad decision. Despite this, they made a truckload of money. They support this by actively hunting down modders...something that Bethesda tried to introduce with paid mods in Skyrim and Fallout 4...that backfired spectacularly. If you miss the through-line, the problem is making a bad decision that will be used as the gold standard for the rest of the industry.
So you may also not be aware of this...but there are things called publisher. Publishers generally make a lot of money with little overhead...so they've taken to buying up companies that make games...because years between large cash infusions are very hard to sustain. If RockStar, owned by Take2, sets the industry standard at $100 being acceptable it'll be fine for Fallout 5, ES 6, Baldur's Gate 4, whatever Ubisoft open world is next, etc... to all cost that much, and it'll prevent people from buying. If instead people smacked a theoretical $100 GTA 6, RockStar would still print money from their gatcha shop and reprice the base game appropriately. That's what we like to call setting a sustainable precedent.
I'm betting in your world, because you seem to think things don't always come from somewhere else, that you believe tomorrow the next Basketball or Football game could suddenly raise its price and consumers would weigh whether or not to buy it. The thing is, that's not how average people work. Average people have a core set of things they purchase based off of interaction with other people, and will forego additional expenses if the core items become more expensive. IE, an increase in the price of eggs doesn't signal people will stop buying eggs, so much as they will go from buying steak to hamburger. This poisons the market for all steak producers. In this case eggs are the annual AAA releases, steak is a new AA game, and hamburger is deeply discounted games (or even piracy in the worst cases).
Let me not only provide you the above examples, but pull a direct comparison. Streaming was great with Netflix. They didn't have the newest shows, but they had no commercials and often cost less per month that two trips to a rental shop. Fast forward a few years, and everybody starts pulling the rights from Netflix to launch their own platforms. Prices remained low, because everyone wants market share. Fast forward again, and everyone is raising prices. Netflix set the precedent, so Disney, HBO, etc... all raised prices. Fast forward again and not only do we have price increases, but commercials. An idea from the age of the Wii was great, but constantly changing goals and bloated content creation budgets (sound familiar to video games?) have brought us to being more expensive than cable, with all its downside. Oh...and because you don't own anything the second you stop paying you lose everything. Every single step led to the next, because nobody pushed back. Now can you maybe see how RockStar pushing a $100 game might do the exact same? Bethesda did. Bethesda introduced horse armor, forcing you to download their creation club stuff but disabling it in your files, attempted to charge for third party made mods, and now will sell you back your achievements on anything you are willing to pay for on the consoles, including game breaking stuff that they initially said was the reason that mods disabled achievements.
Of course you're free to stick both your thumbs into your ears and yell that I'm wrong and not being fair....because I cannot spend the next several days documenting the slippery slope that this is, but I'll leave it to you. Care to join reality...or do you want to demonstrate that Idiocracy is prophetic rather than just a fun bit of movie? I'll wait for you Not Sure.
